A Year in Reading: Rachel Cantor

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I divide this year’s shortlist into three categories: Tales Well Told, Fun Stuff, and Miracles of Voice.

Tales Well Told includes books with stories that captivated. In some cases I wasn’t sure why I liked the book, but I just wanted to keep reading. More, more! These were the books I left parties early to go home to read (or for which, more likely, I skipped the party), the ones that might have caused me to miss my subway stop had I read them on the subway, but I usually didn’t because I had already read them through the night before. Gripping stories, unexpected turns of plot, I have to know what happens next! More, more, more! Meg Wolitzer’sThe Interestings, which I picked up having been entranced by her reading at last year’s Brooklyn Book Festival; Hilary Mantel’sBring Up the Bodies, every bit as wonderful as Wolf Hall; two impressive and chilling debut novels: The Kept by James Scott and Celeste Ng’sEverything I Never Told You; Robin Black’sLife Drawing, which I read in one sitting; Elizabeth Kadetsky’s transporting The Poison that Purifies You; Jay Cantor’sForgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka, hand-sold to me by a very smart bookseller; and Richard Yates’sThe Easter Parade, recommended to me by some wise person on Facebook when I said I was looking for something sad — what that man does with dialogue!

The largest group of loved books this year and probably every year are Miracles of Voice, almost all of which, perhaps because of their eccentricities, are small press books: Alissa Nutting’s riveting collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls; Lore Segal’s witty and sad Half the Kingdom; Jeff Jackson’s startling Mira Corpora; Submergence, J.M. Ledgard’s gorgeous tour de force; Catherine Lacey’s stunning Nobody Is Ever Missing; Kevin Barry’s captivating City of Bohane; and, perhaps above all, Patrick McCabe’s heartbreaking The Butcher Boy, the voice of which stayed in my head for many inconvenient days when I was trying to write my own original pages.

Rachel Cantor
is the author of two novels: A Highly Unlikely Scenario (Melville House 2014) and the forthcoming Door Number Two (Melville House 2015). Two dozen of her stories have appeared in the Paris Review, One Story, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Five Chapters, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn where she is always at work on another book.

I spent more of 2010 than I care to admit working through a spell of writer’s block, brought on not because I didn’t have a project, or even because I doubted that I could finish that project, but because I was briefly and thoroughly convinced that none of it mattered, that of all of the things a person could do with their time, writing a novel was the least likely to improve anyone’s quality of life. The disasters seemed so much bigger than words, and even those crises that were crises of culture rather than climate seemed impermeable. I would watch cable news and think that language had lost all meaning, that my faith in books as a vehicle for empathy and understanding had been naïve and misguided, because empathy was dead.
The two books that most stood out to me this year spoke broke through that haze by reminding me what language can still do. They spoke to the anxieties of the present without being nihilistic or unrealistic about the future. They reminded me, during a year when I spent so much time battling my own distraction that I actually went back to writing longhand, how it felt to be so completely absorbed with a book that I didn’t notice my laptop or my cell phone, or, on one occasion, my metro stop, but also left me ultimately feeling more responsible for the world I live in, instead of more isolated from it.
The first was Isabel Wilkerson’sThe Warmth of Other Suns, a beautifully written and researched account of the great migration. The book expanded my understanding of a story I thought I knew and did a wonderful job of balancing the epic scope of the project with the intimate details of the lives of individuals. It’s hard to tell the story of pre civil-rights movement America without some degree of optimism, because it’s hard to read accounts of the way things were—from the brutal violence of both the U.S south that African-Americans fled and the U.S north that burned down neighborhoods rather than accept them as neighbors, to the quieter brutality of travelers being forced into lonely, unsafe drives because there was no where in the country for a black travel to safely rest—and not think about how much we take for granted now. But Wilkerson resists the reductive optimism of leaving it at that by exploring the ambiguous nature of some of the progress made, and by refusing to force her subjects into being symbols rather than human beings. I think a lot about the ways in which the recent black experience in America has been in some ways similar to an immigration experience, and in making the case that for many families, it was an actual immigration experience, Wilkerson linked the past and the present and reminded me that the past was not so long ago and the future is never set in stone.
The second book was Jennifer Egan’sA Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan did a beautiful job of filtering large anxieties—about time, about technology, about pop-culture, about the limitations of human connection—and making them breathe on the page, through a cast of characters who felt fully alive. After spending so much time this year listening to people weigh in on technology—technology and the future, technology and the book, technology and empathy—it was exciting to see Egan play with that anxiety in the novel form, by letting the question of technology become a question of aesthetics. The aesthetic choices engaged the question without providing a neat or heavy-handed answer. By the time the book shifted to the imagined future, I was grieving less for the loss of the world as I knew it, and more for the private tragedies of Egan’s characters, which were somehow not lost in either the playfulness of the novel’s form or the shift in forms of communication in their new present.
Other favorite new reads for this year: Dwayne Betts’Shahid Reads His Own Palm, Sandra Beasley’sI Was the Jukebox,Lauren Groff’sDelicate Edible Birds, Jennine Capo Crucet’sHow to Leave Hialeah.
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City of Bohane! There is only so much insiderish slang one can read before it starts to wear on one… it’s a bit unrealistic to expect the readers to be familiar w/ oodles of “Irishisms” [if that is what they are]. And the male bravado was boringly familiar from “Lock, stock & smoking barrell” et al. just weak character development. The book has been highly touted but given the arcane terminology, plodding plot and stereotyped characters, I found it a massive disappointment.

In honor of -- or in dismay at -- Oxford Dictionaries announcing “post-truth” as the word of the year, I thought I’d highlight books that dove headlong into fiction, books that are set, quite literally, in the land of literature.
In Gerald Murnane’sA Million Windows, a work comprising 34 sections, the narrator resides in an upper story of “the house of fiction” along with like-minded writers. Henry James’s name naturally comes up frequently in their conversations, but, as the narrator dryly notes, another subject is avoided: “The word plot is seldom heard in the sporadic discussions that take place in the upper corridor of this remote wing of this building that remains largely unfamiliar to most of us.”
A Million Windows is, among other things, a primer on narratology, though when the narrator looks at a chart produced by a renowned German narratologist, it brings to mind an “inscrutable calendar or sky-map from a civilization long since vanished.” The narrator’s primary contention, however, is far from inscrutable: There is an unbridgeable divide between the real, or “visible,” world and the fictional, or “invisible,” world -- each operating under an incompatible set of principles. Both sets of principles are mystifying to the narrator, but “I could never doubt that those in the one differ greatly from those in the other and could never consider any writer claiming otherwise to be anything but a fool.”
There are many such fools. The narrator has little patience for social novelists, “the paraphrasers of yesterday’s newspaper headlines: those who write, often with what is praised as moral indignation or incisive social commentary, about matters that none of us in this building has ever understood, let alone wanted to comment on.” Confessional novelists, whose works “might have passed for documentary films, with themselves as subject-matter,” don’t impress him either. (No Karl Ove Knausgaard on his Christmas list.) He shows a grudging respect for a writer like Charles Dickens and the “control that [he] and others exercised over their characters,” yet views his own lack of control as liberating, admiring Evelyn Waugh’s remark that he had never entertained the least interest in why his characters behaved as they did. The principled narrator technically cohabitates with romance novelists in the house of two or three stories, but late night assignations are unlikely: “Somewhere in this building is a colony of writers of this sort of fiction, although none of us has sought to learn where.”
The narrator distrusts easy mimeticism, railing against the “faulty fiction” that draws on filmic techniques to set the scene: “What happens in the mind of the reader of true fiction is richer and more memorable by far than anything seen through the lens of a camera or overheard by an author in a bar or a trailer park.” Dialog is a no-no for a variety of reasons: because it makes the text look like a “filmscript;” allows the writer to avoid “struggl[ing] with a report of elusive or abstruse matters;” and, crucially, is a device that “most readily persuades the undiscerning reader that the purpose of fiction is to provide the nearest possible equivalents of experiences obtainable in this, the visible world where books are written and read.” As a result, the narrator and his ilk react with palpable disgust opening dialog-heavy books, “the sight of quotation marks looking like swarms of flies...” An Ivy Compton Burnett novel would thus be a festering carcass.
What, then, distinguishes “true” fiction from “faulty” fiction? A Million Windows answers this question by defining and then exhibiting what true fiction looks like. First the definition -- or rather one of many:
We sense that true fiction is more likely to include what was overlooked or ignored or barely seen or felt at the time of its occurrence but comes continually to mind ten or twenty years afterwards not on account of its having long ago provoked passion or pain but because of its appearing to be part of a pattern of meaning that extends over much of a lifetime.
A certain Keatsian receptivity is required, the willingness to obey the apparitions delivering the following command: “Write about me in order to discover my secret and to learn what throng of images, as yet invisible, lie around me.” There are tantalizing snippets of these “haunters,” or “ghosts above the pages,” or “casters of fictional shadows” -- all terms used to emphasize the absolute otherworldliness of the fictional realm and its inhabitants. Primary among these is the narrator’s mother, who “for reasons that he could never afterwards recall...was not to be trusted.” (Trust -- in narrators, people, readers -- is a main theme.) The mother is the first in a series of dark-haired haunters who bewitch him. In some cases, a brief glimpse of a stranger is enough: “A few strands of hair and a small area of skin of a certain colour had started him on a detailed mental enterprise that occupied much of his free time for two years.” (With so little else to grasp onto, colors become almost more important than characters.)
There are two ways to read A Million Windows. One would be to recoil at the narrator’s ostentatiously recondite, and rigid, vision of fiction and stubbornly defend the meticulously choreographed plots, intense identification with characters, genre fiction, film, and prestige television. Or, as the “discerning reader” mentioned throughout the novel, you could marvel at the narrator’s ostentatiously recondite, and rigid, vision of fiction, then, before picking up another Murnane -- say, Inland -- treat yourself to a cozy mystery, perhaps set in a house of two or three stories with numberless windows.
And now for something completely different...yet another work of the fictional landscape made manifest: Christopher Boucher’sGolden Delicious. The novel takes place in the town of Appleseed, Mass., or rather in the pages of Appleseed. Plentiful stories used to grow in the once fertile soil, and “wild language” ran through the streets, prompting parents to enact “no language-in-the-house policies.” But a blight has struck Appleseed, and the ground is filled with “dead language...commas, semicolons, fragments, wordbones, and other carcasses.” Meanwhile, bookworms, with their unparalleled “ability to metaphor,” have infiltrated the town and spread their rot into language, rendering sentences incoherent and threatening to destroy the lifeblood of the economy: meaning.
The narrative world runs riot with personifications. A certain War is said to have died after a truce, though rumors persist that he lives on. The narrator loses his virginity to the Appleseed Community Theater: “The scene happened so quickly; soon it was one spotlight, then several, and then all the light, bright hot white, and then curtains and applause, and darkness.” And the description of an automobile as “a strange metaphor of a vehicle, assembled from pieces and parts of others cars” reminded me of a friend’s elegant, turnpike-inspired simile that forever solidified for me the distinction between a metaphor’s tenor and vehicle: “My love for you is like a truck.”
Yes, the novel is clotted with whimsy, and some readers won’t find its wit, or scenes of non-whimsical menace, sufficient to counteract the glut. But for me the fanciful novel managed to walk the tightrope, stumbling but never falling into the cloying abyss.
And now for something even more completely different...I’ve been paging through an edition of The Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408), a baffling 15th-century book of “herbal, astrological, balneological (relating to healing baths), and pharmacological” drawings accompanied by an impenetrable text that has never been decoded. The manuscript was once purchased for the low price of 600 ducats by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who thought it to be a work by Roger Bacon; centuries later, a shadowy rare books dealer and revolutionary by the name of Wilfrid Michael Voynich got his hands on it. Yale University’s Beinecke Library has the book now.
The Voynich MS is not a work of fiction -- though it very well may be a hoax -- and yet there is something of the fictional imagination at play, a commitment to a private truth expressed in a private, indecipherable way. The sui generis manuscript contains a world unto itself. In one section, a series of nude women bathe in green water, in blue water, in communal or private tubs, posed in foot baths or sticking their arms in an octopus-like contraption of pipes and funnels. What Whitmanian raptures, or hygienic tips, does the surrounding text reveal?
We will probably never know. William Friedman, “the world’s greatest cryptologist” who led the U.S. effort to break Japanese codes in World War II, tried to solve the riddle over many years. His final statement on the matter expressed “the futility of searching for anagrammatic ciphers,” and the statement itself concealed a coded message: “The Voynich MS was an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type—Friedman.”
That doesn’t mean I won’t give it a try. After all, in the past year I’ve successfully completed Escape the Room -- twice.
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This year brought forth another crop of terrific books about the D, as we Detroiters refer to our beloved, beleaguered hometown. Here are four of the year’s very best:
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
When the debut novel The Turner House was published last summer, I wrote a foam-at-the-mouth review because I was smitten by Angela Flournoy’s assured portrait of a sprawling Detroit family’s struggle to deal with their rotting home-place on the city’s rotting east side. The titular house was the family’s “mascot” and “coat of arms,” but as the 2008 recession bears down, it’s empty and worth about one-tenth of what’s owed on it. Through this ingenious lens, Flournoy examines the inner lives of Francis and Viola Flournoy, up from Arkansas, and their rumbustious brood of 13 children –-- and, in the bargain, she explores such big topics as the Great Migration and Detroit’s racial divide, as well as the small dramas that take place inside the city’s casinos, pawn shops, and living rooms. It’s a bewitching blend of the grand and the intimate.
I was delighted when The Turner House was named a finalist for this year’s National Book Award for fiction. Though the novel didn’t win, the nomination surely enlarged its pool of readers who, like me, are waiting impatiently to see what the gifted Angela Flournoy comes up with next.
Scrapper by Matt Bell
Matt Bell’s second novel, Scrapper, gets its hands dirty wrestling with Detroit’s abundant wreckage, both material and human. It does this by taking us into the dark and dangerous world of a freelance metal scrapper named Kelly, who works the city’s gutted core, known here as “the zone.” There, one day, he makes a horrific discovery: a naked 12-year-old boy handcuffed to a bed in the sound-proofed basement of an abandoned house. The shock of this discovery complicates Kelly’s life, sends the novel soaring, and breaks the reader’s heart. Working the high wire without a net, Matt Bell has dared to take us into a netherworld rarely visited in even the best books about Detroit.
Once in a Great City by David Maraniss
David Maraniss, a Detroit native, prolific author, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, came out this year with a joyride of a non-fiction book called Once In a Great City: A Detroit Story. Rather than trying to dissect the many sources of his hometown’s misery, Maraniss goes in the opposite direction: he gives us a Technicolor snapshot of the city at its giddy peak, from late 1962 to early 1964, when the long decline was set in motion but most Detroiters were too busy making money and having fun to notice. The book gives us a compelling cast of characters, from the famous to the obscure, including Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy, Henry Ford II, Berry Gordy, Walter Reuther, an infamous prostitute, a beat cop, and a kid playing hooky. As Maraniss writes in his introduction:
It was a time of uncommon possibility and freedom when Detroit created wondrous and lasting things. But life can be luminescent when it is most vulnerable. There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition, what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.
How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass by Aaron Foley
Last but not least -- and just in time for Christmas -- the Cleveland-based independent press Belt Publishing has come out with that rarest oxymoron: a smart how-to book. This one’s author, Aaron Foley, is a Detroit native and current resident who seems to know everything about the city -- its history, language, food, fashions, architecture, music, politics, news media, neighborhoods, literature, social customs, and racial minefields -- and he has a knack for imparting his vast knowledge in humorous, insightful, helpful prose. The kicker on the cover was enough to make me love the book before I read the first page. Detroit, it announces, is not the new Brooklyn! Having done six years in Brooklyn, my first thought was: Hallelujah.
How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass could not have existed even a few years ago, because it was inspired by and is addressed to the very recent influx of transplants, many of them young and white and creative, who have been drawn to Detroit by the prevailing narrative that the place is cheap, supportive, wide-open, and on the rebound. Foley opens the book with a list of rules for new arrivals, including this cold-eyed satirical stinger:
The fifth rule applies to all you transplants from New York City and other places that are really expensive: please do not consider moving to Detroit part of a deep, soul-touching experience that will wash clean the sins of your past and renew your spiritual energy to live in your new purpose. This ain’t fucking Eat, Pray, Love, OK? You likely moved here because you either wanted to further your career or you got priced out of where you were.
As this quote illustrates, Foley’s mission is both to inform and to amuse, and he does a knockout job of both. Among the many subjects he tackles are how to drive in Detroit, how to be white in Detroit, how to be black in Detroit, how to make peace with the suburbs, how to do business in Detroit, and how to renovate a Detroit house without being a jackass. He remarks that only new arrivals wear the popular DETROIT -vs- EVERYBODY T-shirts, which carried a personal sting because I grew up in Detroit, in both the city and the suburbs, and I’m wearing one of the T-shirts as I write these words. (It was a gift from a nephew who recently visited the city -- honest!) Frankly, I like the us-against-the-world sentiment. To each his own, I say.
At the heart of this book is Foley’s position as a native Detroiter -- that is, as someone who is stubbornly proud of his troubled hometown, and weary of the clichés and half-baked myths that continue to cling to the place like the smoke gushing from the stacks at Ford’s River Rouge factory. As he wrote in last year’s superb A Detroit Anthology, edited by Anna Clark, Foley is tired of Detroit being “the butt of jokes and the target of pity.” So his noble mission in this new book is to wipe away the jokes and the pity, the clichés and myths, so people can start to see Detroit for what it truly is. The picture Foley paints isn’t always pretty, but it’s always real. All readers -- native Detroiters and new arrivals, citizens of America and residents of outer Mongolia -- should thank him for telling it like it is. Isn’t that what all books are supposed to do?
More from A Year in Reading 2015Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.